Millionaire Anywhere

Case study on enhancing a business website

Overview

The Millioniare Anywhere is a podcast started by Aaron Brabham, formerly the moderator of James Altucher’s question and answer podcast, Ask Altucher. When I went to sign up for Aaron’s newsletter on my phone, I noticed his site was not responsively designed. In the spirit of James Altucher’s 10 ideas, I responsively redesigned The Millionaire Anywhere site and sent Aaron 10 ideas for optimizing his site. He was kind enough to thank me for my ideas which you can find below.

Responsively design the site so the content adapts to the size of the device accessing it. Google now penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly in its search rankings. Check out a responsive version of your site.

Enhance page speed to improve converesion rates. I did a page speed test and the current site has a first view load of 9 seconds and a repeat view load of 2 seconds. Note that these statistics are from a DSL connection – mobile performance is much worse. Studies show that visitors begin abandoning pages after 3 seconds of load time. The redesigned site gets first view page load down to 2 seconds and repeat view load to under half a second.

Concatenate site files for increased rendering speed. Browsers accessing your site currently make 54 requests, significantly delaying how fast first time visitors see your content. The site I redesigned reduces the number of requests by 75 percent. Not only does page speed affect conversions, Google now uses it for search rankings.

Reduce the size of the background image. This file is the heaviest on your page at 529 KB. On the redesigned site, I’ve reduced it by 92 percent to 38 KB.

Limit the background image to the banner. Rendering large images as you scroll lags on less powerful devices such as phones.

Responsively load images. Notice on the redesigned site I display three images in the “Meet Your Host” section on a desktop, but on a phone I only display one image. This eliminates two additional image requests for devices that have less screen real estate and are accessing content from slower, cellular networks that charge by the MB.

Use a vector-based logo. Vector images scale pixel-perfect to any size screen because they’re rendered using mathematics. Since a logo is one of your most important marketing tools, you definitely don’t want it pixelated. Vector images also make your site faster because they can be embedded rather than requiring yet another browser request. You can grab the vector version of your logo from the redesigned page immediately.

Validate your newsletter subscription on the page. When visitors input an invalid email address, it’s much less confusing to let them know what went wrong immediately rather than taking them to another page. Try clicking subscribe on the redesigned site to check out the immediate validation.

Ask only for an email address to increase sign-ups. I realize you customize the subscription confirmation email with people’s names, but unless you plan to personalize further, asking for just their email could improve your conversion rate. The more information you ask for, the less likely visitors are to sign up.

Replace SumoMe to speed up your page and reduce costs. I can recreate the contact and newsletter popups to significantly reduce the number and size of files on your page. For analytics, free tools like Google Analytics can track everything from failed subscription attempts to how many users make it to the bottom of your page.

Details

Since writing my first lines of code in elementary school I've developed expertise in software engineering, team leadership, and project management. Today I’m passionate about engineering fast, scalable applications powered by the cloud. My skills and experience enable me to deliver a holistic approach that generates results.